There has long been in use for the production of textile yarns textile in the industry devices for removing cops from machinery whereon they are formed and replacing them with spools adapted to provide support for a freshly formed cop.
Such devices sometimes have significant disadvantages which makes their use generally inconvenient and restricts their widespread application, especially at existing plants where the available space between the machinery for extruding filaments and the various cop formation sites is often quite limited.
Conventionally operated devices, in fact, take considerable floor space for carrying out the operations in question, the devices often comprising several discrete pieced of machinery for carrying out the various operations involved, sometimes including a bin containing a supply of spools and/or a cop collecting bin.
Conventional devices for automatically removing cops are required in general to be positioned at several sites relative to a machine for replacement of spools in order to carry out the spool changing operation.
It is known, for instance, from European Patent No. 0026471, to employ a device for spool changing which can effect the operation automatically, but this device requires two carts for supporting the various operating assemblies, which carts require continued alternate positioning in front of a spindle whereon a cop is being formed, which is time consuming as well as involving a complex machine construction.
That patent discloses a method of delivering cops from the device in question to a collection cart, which requires considerable floor space.
In the production of continuous filament spinning from a melt, complexity of the plant upstream of the resulting thread winding machine requires that the thread extrusion should not be discontinued during the spool changing steps and suitable devices are employed to divert the thread and collect it throughout such operations. The thread being produced during this time period is regarded as scrap, which results in a waste of material.
In this situation, the rate at which the spool is changed and any other operations carried out with the thread winding disrupted is extremely critical, thus making desireable the availability of machines which do not require repeated positioning and which can provide for the spool change in a short time.